Front Row Seats to a Hanging
by hauntedhouses
Summary: Light is dead. L is deader. If he can't get Light to remember that he's Kira, the both of them will fade from existence- and Soichiro hopes they do. Featuring: Lawlight in a place that could be hell but looks like an amusement park, and a grief-stricken Soichiro, aware of exactly who his son is. Flawed logic, false love, and ferris wheels. May stay a one-shot, may be continued.


When Light died, he woke up in an amusement park.

The date of his death was January 28, 2010. The time of his death was roughly in the late afternoon, just late enough that the traffic had stopped, the streets were quiet, and families gathered for dinner in their homes. And it was just early enough for the sun to be shining. Yes, he remembered that the sun was out- recalled the anxiety of being watched, and, if he wasn't being watched, the knowledge that he could have been. It was a quite different feeling from his usual range of emotions- which perhaps couldn't have been called a range because generally he felt only a few: jubilation, cruel and sharp. Disgust. Loneliness. Boredom. He remembered running- neither running away nor running too. It was lovely out. Warm, for January. And then, quite suddenly, Light Yagami was dead.

He seemed young. Too young to be dead- though he suspected such was the sentiment among anyone who had simply ceased to exist. There was no such thing as 'too old to die.' Existing, really, was the only constant- he now knew that was true without a doubt in his mind. He was blinking, seeing- though not breathing, it seemed. He had no heartbeat. Still, given that he remained capable of taking in his surroundings, there was no other logical conclusion at which to arrive.

So then, Light was no longer alive but he retained his consciousness. This was a curious matter of confusion to him. He felt that normally it was the other way around. But he was no coma patient trapped in some vegetative state, alive only in name. That, he felt certain, he would feel. There was another possibility, of course: that this was a false consciousness, only a perception of living, a psychological coping mechanism as his organs failed one by one- like airplane instruments flickering to red before the metal beast simply dropped from the sky. If he was actually still alive, but in the process of dying, he reasoned he would have around half an hour.

It seemed rational enough to assume, however, that this was some sort of afterlife, some alternate state of existence, a universe running parallel to his own. Light felt certain his own mind would not conjure this amusement park. If asked to imagine his heaven, Light might have described a university, where he was neither expected to pay nor to attend classes. All he really needed was a room to himself and books to read.

This was, again, only what he might have described. In his life, Light was almost (but not quite) certain he had never experienced anything akin to any sort of heaven.

Thinking too hard in the face of such a pressing matter seemed particularly dangerous to him, like pulling a loose string on a sweater to watch the fabric unravel completely. But if that needed to happen- the unraveling- let it, he decided. If this place was a ruse, a mental construction designed to lure him from the fear of his own death, he would rather uncover the truth. Light would not die brainwashed and complacent. If he could only deduce that he was still alive but in the process of dying, he was certain he would be able to wake himself up. There was a certain force of will he knew well, a force required to wrench a consciousness from nightmares and fling him naked and unprepared back into the sudden and overwhelming reality of its own bedroom. He suspected pulling himself back from death could be more difficult. He imagined it in a peculiar way, having no reality to ground it in: a tracking missile locked on another dimension, searching desperately for something it could never find. Light hoped this was the afterlife. He hoped his body was not still alive and fighting. His death, he was fairly certain, was not one of natural causes. Light Yagami was twenty-three years old, or at least he had been. And with some distant compassion for his failed body he hoped he wasn't still suffering like an animal in a trap, undignified and feral. He did not want to die. He did not want to be dying, and if this was the afterlife then he was at least, in the most important ways, fundamentally alive.

His hell would be nonexistence.

Bells rang overhead. Were they knells? Was that it, then, some sort of dreamy mental representation of the paddles pressing into his chest, electricity flooding his body and failing in its resuscitation? He always hated waking from nightmares. It was always too shocking, too soon. It was far more frightening to be awake and disoriented than to be asleep and have some knowledge of the rules of the game, some control over his body. It was rather warm here. He did not want to reemerge into the world as some Frankensteinian creation, reanimated by an electric pulse.

Did he kill himself? He didn't think he had.

It would not have made a terrible amount of sense for him to be murdered, though he was equally certain such a dramatic end wouldn't have been impossible. He was a criminal investigator for the NPA- yes, some details returned with force and clarity- and perhaps that would have been sufficient enough motivation for someone to do him in. That is, if this someone was entirely inept. There were other investigators. Light instinctually felt he was the best, but there were others. Besides, he hadn't made any substantial headway on a case recently. He no longer knew why, but this temporary ignorance did not concern him. If it would only require time to uncover the truth about how he had died and why he was here, there was no cause for concern. Light Yagami was dead, and he'd never had more time on his hands.

The bell tower was candy pink. The sky was a vivid, frightening blue. The world around him was almost violent in its brightness, and he wondered what he would look like if he could see his face in a mirror. Was this the genuine hue of death? –not sickly and pale but bright, too bright, an overcompensation. Life was paler; it had no need to prove itself. Overhead the Ferris wheel turned in dizzy circles. There were no passengers in the cars, and roller coasters screamed into their drops. There were no angels. He hadn't expected them. The heavenly chorus was an ice cream truck jingle, trailing formlessly through the air from an indefinable location. It rounded the Ferris wheel, dove down with the roller coasters, swirled and spun on every ride until it surrounded him like an unwelcome embrace. There should have been wind but there wasn't. The air was heavy and still. Even though the rides moved they continued along their same circular paths, not stopping for passengers. There were no passengers. There was no one. Even though they moved Light was the only one with some degree of autonomy, free to walk where he pleased-

Was he? The thought struck him suddenly. He'd always doubted the idea of Heaven as a society. The idea of a heavenly economy troubled him; were there heavenly international relations? Did children who died have to attend heavenly schools and universities? What about very young children, infants without parents? Did they age or were they stuck, static? Did their minds grow as if detached from their bodies? He loathed to imagine a shriveled little thing with the mind of Socrates, for he had been one of those- a dwarfish prodigy with dead eyes and a scathingly cynical worldview. If their parents went to hell, were there orphanages to care for them in Heaven? And what of angels? Were angels people who lived moral lives? Or, as the Bible suggested, were angels a different species entirely? In that case there must be some sort of class system, a hierarchy of the divine and the once-mortal. And with any class system there came discrimination. No one could convince Light there was no discrimination in Heaven. In fact, intolerance seemed to be its very basis- intolerance of evil, of immorality, deviation from a set standard. To live in delicate, utopian coexistence was to be utterly stripped of one's personality, of one's soul. It had always seemed to Light that it was a person's body that went to Heaven while their soul remained underground or burnt to ashes- writhing, restless. Was Light in Heaven now? If so, did he retain his free will? Could he take a step forward if he wanted, cut the threads of the divine and take them in his hands to sew the tapestry of his own fate? He took a step forwards. Yes. He could. Excellent.

The motion of the roller coasters and the Ferris wheel, though repetitive, was reassuring. Without this movement he would be almost certain that he was dead and trapped in a hellish stagnation. This still world would be the flattest kind of afterlife; one image frozen on an LCD screen right before the television flickered off. Once upon a time Light wondered if that was why people who died briefly thought they had gone to Heaven: they were frozen in the last sputtering image of their dying brain. They relinquished their lives in the face of this imagined comfort only to feel their world hardening around them. So this was not Heaven- at least, it was no biblical Heaven. And Light still existed, even if only in the labyrinth of his own mind. If this was the case, he could take some degree of comfort. He was intelligent enough to fool himself. If already dead, he could live on in the universe of his coffin through willpower alone.

If this was an afterlife of sorts, what were the rules? Was this an infinite plane, with near-infinite humans scattered about at random intervals? If he wandered for long enough would he find someone else? Or was this merely an entry point to a larger reality? Would he be alone here forever? That possibility seemed unlikely. If this were a projection of his own mind- an option with an estimated probability of only two percent- surely someone he knew would invade his consciousness. That wasn't to say this solitude was unbearable. Instead it was relaxing- or it might have been, if he could encounter just one other person and determine the nature of his surroundings. Did he need to eat or sleep? He found, suddenly, that he could not remember what foods he liked. It would come back to him, he felt certain. But for the moment he remained a mere phantom, in possession of a body that by chance happened to be his own.

In response to his question, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

Light turned his head (and rather calmly, for a man who had only recently pronounced himself dead) to look at a dark-haired specimen with deep black eyes. The man was taller and leaner than Light, an impressive and inadvertently threatening accomplishment. Light himself was tall and lean- but then, Light was not spiderlike like him. He was messy, with dirt under his fingernails and bags under his eyes. His jeans were torn; his sweatshirt was white and also torn. With his gaze locked on Light, he offered a ghastly little smile.

"It's settled, then," Light decided. "We're dead."

"You only just realized?" he inquired with a gentle sort of malevolence, like the soft lull of a tired sea, belly bloated with the carcass of a shipwreck. In it was the rhythm of waterlogged bodies floating further and further down into the Earth's wet throat.

"There was a possibility I was comatose," Light replied; and he would not have bothered to reply if not for the soft condescension in the man's voice. "I died. I recognized that right away. But I still thought this might all be a product of my dying brain- I didn't think it was likely, but I chose not to rule out the option until I had proof. Now I do. I've never seen you before in my life."

"Hm. Would you remember if you had?"

Light replied without hesitation. "Yes."

"That's an interesting train of thought- what you were talking about earlier," he said, tapping his bony knuckles against one another. "You said that we are dead- the pair of us, that is. But it seems you only have proof that you yourself are dead. What about me? Do you have any proof of that?"

Light stared.

"No," the man went on, "but that's a forgivable offense. You didn't ask my name, though. I'm the only person here and you don't care to ask my name."

"No. Would you like me to?"

"Yes."

For a moment Light stood in incredulous silence, a sense of etiquette the only force compelling him to remain there with the stranger. Light was taught manners. They were the only things anyone had needed to teach him. Since childhood Light loved to learn, but only recently had he learned not to loathe being taught. "What's your name?"

A low cackle. "Would you like to call me L?"

Again, Light stared. "No," he said. "I would not."

"A pity," he replied, thumbing his lip. "Well, I'll still call you Light."

"I assume you know I didn't tell you my name."

"You didn't need to. In any case," the man went on, spreading his arms out as if in some grand display- though he only displayed himself. Light had no real desire to look but admittedly, there was a lot to look at largely because there was so little. It was the absence in him, the inversion of his appearance. His cheeks were hollow, and now that Light really looked he could see the man's fingertips were waxy and bruise-purple. If Light were newly dead, a fresh corpse, then it was no wonder he regarded this man with such apprehension. He was long dead. Light stared at him as if he might begin to rot. "My name is in fact L. Do you want to know where you are?"

"No thanks. It was nice to meet you, but I think I'll figure this out for myself." Light turned and the man was there.

"I can't let you do that," the man said, if he was a man- or L said, if he was L, though that couldn't have been a real name. It felt strange assigning names to a corpse, like loving a pig that was to be slaughtered. But L was more predatory than that, lithe fingers creeping along the edge of Light's arm. It was only just then that Light realized he was wearing a suit and tie. He could feel the silk press into his skin every time L's hands jumped over him. For a moment he wondered when it was- the last time he was touched. Did it count if people were handling his body now, lowering him into a coffin, into the ground? Maybe he hadn't reached that point yet. Maybe the doctors had only just given up. Maybe he was lying in a pool of blood in his apartment. Maybe the police were on their way and maybe they weren't. Maybe no one else would touch him for days.

But those hypotheticals bore no rational purpose. It would do no good to dwell on them, when there were more pressing questions at hand.

"Are you God?" Light asked flatly, taking a slow step backwards.

L raised his eyebrows, or Light imagined he did. The man's forehead was hidden behind that thick shock of black hair and so Light could only determine his exact expression through little hints: faint wrinkles, the tightening of skin. "Maybe. Is that a rhetorical question?"

"It's more of a thought experiment." Light turned again, and he was there. Light shirked his grasp only to find him clamping down on his opposite arm, a reflected mirror image of something no longer in existence. An ex-L. "If you control this space, wouldn't that make you God? A person's only real power is their intellect and free will. And intellect- that is, the raw potential for intelligence- is hypothetically given by God. Maybe it isn't so hypothetical, given that I'm dead but I'm not dead."

"Go on," said L.

"If you have foreknowledge of every choice I make- foreknowledge enough to jump around like a shadow and stop me from leaving your side- what does that say about my free will? If you know what I'm about to do, who's to say I have control over my actions at all? It implies some larger script."

"A script you think I've written?"

"That's exactly what I'm asking," he replied, staring intently at L. He seemed to buzz around the edges like television static, and Light asked himself which was real: L, or the Technicolor world enveloping the two of them?

"But Light, if I were God, would I need to control you?"

Light was ready to rebut, halfway through fruitlessly ducking away again, when he caught the hardness in L's eyes. He let out an undignified snort. "But L. That's what God does."

"You're wrong," he said, going suddenly quite still. "But we can continue this later. Some other time."

"I told you he didn't remember," L said pointedly, icy fingers still pressed onto each side of Soichiro's skull as the last traces of Light's memories poured in.

The world before Soichiro was not so bright as what Light could see- or rather, it was, but he found it nauseating. He too recognized it was a show, an act, death's desperate display to rouse the appetite of those who were so recently living. He wondered if, after a long enough time, it would all decay. He wondered if the amusement park would ever crumble, if the paint would flake off into rust. He wondered if it rained here. It hadn't yet.

"It's my job, you know. To make him remember," L continued.

"We won't," Soichiro murmured, meeting the blackness of L's eyes. "He doesn't want to remember."

L's eyes widened, a shocking display given that they already bulged from his head as if they might fall out. Soichiro passed with such peace he might not have believed he was dead- if it wasn't for L, a barefoot corpse in secondhand jeans. "I want him to remember," L insisted, petulant. And Soichiro recognized the tone because he'd heard it in his own son's voice only seconds ago, a manner of speaking privy to L but not himself. So there it was: Light loved the man who'd have him executed. That could be the only explanation for such honesty. "You don't have to be here, Soichiro. This isn't your job."

L was a man who died in the arms of his murderer. That was unfortunate enough. L was an orphan, Soichiro knew that now, subject to all sorts of cruelties. If Light didn't remember everything about his life, about his crimes, certainly L didn't either. There was too much suffering and too many misguided crusades for justice- and the worst part was they weren't even 'misguided,' exactly, because L was smart enough to quite know what he was doing. L was a man who bore those burdens. But Soichiro was the man who rejected Heaven in favor of Light. The illumination of this dark knowledge was too impure for the kingdom above. If he wanted to know, he had to leave.

So he left.

"It's Light's job to remember and to repent," L continued. "It's my job, my punishment, to make sure he does. "

Light loved the man who had him executed. Light murdered hundreds of thousands when he pretended to be studying for his entrance exams. Light smiled like an angel and played murder games on Soichiro's deathbed. Light knelt at Soichiro's grave more than once and still could not bring himself to confess. Light was unrepentant, but he was still sorry. There was a difference, even if ever so slight. Now Light was dead.

His oldest son was dead.

"And what if you don't?" Soichiro asked.

"Then I cease to exist," L replied, eyes darkening. "Then he ceases to exist. This is hell, you know. It can't all be Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds."

"So let him," Soichiro said. "Let him cease to exist."

The air hung heavy between them. Sounds rang out through the rest of the park to fill the silence: the distant music of the merry go round, uneasy and off-key. Sounds of laughter coming from some indefinable place- to the right, to the left, and all around even though no one was there. The mechanical clicks of a roller coaster drop. The wet noises of L's lips.

"You know I can't do that."

"Because you love him?" Soichiro spat, rather unexpectedly.

"Because I love him," L echoed.

"You're not going to make him remember."

"Because he doesn't want to?" L asked, lips tightening.

"Because I love him."


End file.
